The second day of the event, hosted by Samsung Research, the advanced R&D hub of the company that leads the development of future technologies for Samsung Electronics’ Consumer Electronics division and IT & Mobile Communications division, facilitated discussion around how industry experts and academics alike can further research into AI technologies that directly impact and enhance the lives of all people. It was livestreamed on Samsung Electronics’ YouTube channel, providing opportunities for researchers and students in the AI field around the world to interact with world-renowned academics through Live Panel Discussions.

AI Forum Day 2: Exploring ‘AI’ in a Human World

Dr. Sebastian Seung, President and Head of Samsung Research, began his opening speech by emphasizing that “Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing every single R&D area of Samsung Research. AI technology was thought impossible, but is now becoming a reality and makes people’s lives better.”

During his speech, which introduced Samsung Research’s various areas of AI research, Dr. Seung explained how on-device AI technology is enabling smartphone cameras to offer users new ways to express their creativity and manage other devices such as TVs and air conditioners. He also provided insights into other applications for AI technology, which includes enabling robot vacuums to automatically create indoor 3D maps, detect obstacles and clean a space accordingly.

Dr. Seung concluded his speech by describing his excitement to see what Samsung’s researchers would be presenting and inviting participants to follow Samsung Research’s Twitter account to learn more about the innovative research that the R&D hub is conducting.

Seung’s speech was followed by presentations from world-renowned AI experts who are leading research in their respective fields.

First, Professor Leslie Valiant of Harvard University, the recipient of the 2010 Turing Award – often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing – delivered the day’s keynote lecture, entitled “How to Augment Supervised Learning with Reasoning”. Using robust logic as an example, Professor Valiant emphasized that combining supervised learning and reasoning should be a key focus for the next generation of machine learning technology.

Professor Valiant’s keynote was followed by a presentation from Professor Felix Heide of Princeton University. Professor Heide’s presentation, entitled “The Differentiable Camera”, discussed the camera technology that utilizes deep learning to enhance image quality.

Next, research scientist Been Kim of Google Brain delivered a presentation entitled “Interpretability for Skeptical Minds”, in which she shared the latest advancements in interpretable machine learning and proposed directions that this cutting-edge technology should be heading.

The last session of the day was led by Professor Max Welling, a research chair in machine learning at the University of Amsterdam and a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. During his presentation, entitled “Understanding Matter With Deep Learning”, Professor Welling shared why he is so excited about the scientific breakthroughs that will come from utilizing deep learning in molecular simulation.

Other highlights of Day 2 included a Lightning Talks session, which saw engineers from Samsung Research’s Global AI Center present some of their latest research, and a live panel discussion that was moderated by Dr. Daniel Lee, Executive Vice President and Head of Samsung Research Global AI Center.

In case you missed it, you can watch a full replay of day two of the Samsung AI Forum 2021 by heading to Samsung Electronics’ YouTube channel.

Pavel Ostyakov, one of the researchers from SAIC-Moscow, won first place among 110 teams at the “Inclusive Images Challenge,” a Kaggle¹ competition hosted by Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2018, which took place in Montreal, Canada from December 3^rd to the 8^th. NeurIPS, formerly known as NIPS, is the world’s largest conference in the field of AI. As of 2017, a total of 8,000 people participated at the event. Apart from machine learning and neuroscience, experts from many related research fields such as cognitive science, computer vision, statistical linguistics, and information theory actively participate in the conference. Winning this challenge was a significant achievement for both Samsung and Pavel as he has been named the Competitions Grandmaster in the Kaggle category of data science expertise, which is the highest tier possible. Pavel also has the honor of being ranked one of the world’s top five scientists on Kaggle.

In the “Inclusive Images Challenge”, participants developed image recognition and classifier models that can successfully perform image classification tasks even when the test images are geographically and culturally different from the previously shown images in which the recognition models were trained for.

(Left image, from left) Pavel Ostyakov, a Researcher at Samsung AI Center-Moscow (SAIC-Moscow), and Jin Wook Lee, the Head of Samsung R&D Institute Russia. (Right image) A snapshot of SAIC-Moscow’s opening ceremony, which took place in May of this year

For example, an image classifier may fail to properly apply “wedding” related labels, such as “bride,” “groom,” and “celebration,” to an image, if a couple is not wearing traditional western European wedding attires or colors. This challenge attempts to address the biases that exist in many of the most popular training datasets. Through this challenge, researchers can identify ways to teach image classifiers by generalizing the accumulated data and apply them in new geographic and cultural contexts. The expectation is that the scientific community will make even more progress in inclusive machine learning that benefits everyone, everywhere.

Samsung has been a strong proponent for inclusive and fair AI in which the two principles are deeply incorporated into its AI developments, emphasizing the need for a truly global and bias-free artificial intelligence as it plays a bigger role in society. Samsung’s joining of the Partnership on AI (PAI) in November is also a part of this effort.

Last September, the SAIC-Moscow team also participated in “The 2nd YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge,” hosted by the European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) 2018. ECCV is one of the world’s top research conferences in the computer vision area and is held biennially. In this Kaggle competition, researchers were provided with public YouTube-8M training and validation datasets that consists of millions of videos with labels, and then asked to develop classification algorithms, which accurately predicts the labels of 700,000 previously unseen YouTube videos. During the competition, the SAIC-Moscow team utilized a unique approach in its complex model and data analysis, placing second by a very narrow margin.

An exterior view of the White Square Business Center, where SAIC-Moscow is located

“We love these competitions because they provide us with opportunities to measure ourselves to participate with the best in the AI industry,” said Pavel Ostyakov at SAIC-Moscow. “Researchers at Samsung are obsessed with making AI a part of everyday lives. So, it is exciting to take part in the challenges where we can contribute our skills to develop the technology.”

The global AI centers reflect Samsung’s commitment to next generation AI development. Besides Russia, there are six others located across the globe – Korea, Silicon Valley and New York in the U.S., Toronto and Montreal in Canada, and Cambridge, the U.K. Each location is focused on a different area of strengths and leverages its unique characteristics. These AI centers are playing a pivotal role in implementing Samsung’s vision for human-centric AI technologies and products.

* 1 An online community allowing users to find and publish datasets, explore and build models in a web-based data-science environment, work with others, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.